


kept safe by someone who loves you

by orphanbeat



Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, I'm sure there's more, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Minor Character Death, Panic Attacks, Recreational Drug Use, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Love, co-dependency to the max, i'll update tags as I think of them!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-02-23 01:29:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23736898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphanbeat/pseuds/orphanbeat
Summary: "Are you leaving?"John finds himself asking Paul the same question, over and over.Until he makes Paul ask him instead.
Relationships: Brian Epstein/John Lennon (mentioned), John Lennon/Paul McCartney, John Lennon/Yoko Ono (mentioned), Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney (mentioned)
Comments: 20
Kudos: 77





	kept safe by someone who loves you

**Author's Note:**

> I've never written/posted RPF, so I'm not sure I know all the ins-and-outs of disclaimers and the like. But obviously, no defamation intended, and this is an entirely new version of events, never intended as fact or close interpretation!
> 
> I messed with the timeline of things a decent bit, so again, as above, lost of storytelling going on here, no relaying of facts!
> 
> (Can you tell I've never done this before? I'm scared af!)
> 
> Anyway, unrequited love and paranoid drug use is a bitch!

**1962.**

Brian’s hand burns a hole through the small of John’s back. 

“How are we doing, boys?” Brian asks, delightfully relaxed after a week in the sun with a dear friend. “You got settled into your rooms quite alright?”

“Fine, Brian,” George says into his pint, but John doesn’t stop looking at Paul. Paul, who’s looking anywhere but at John. 

“Alright, John?” Ringo asks, noticing he hasn’t said a word. 

“Oh, yes,” John says, putting on a good smile. “Fully cooked.”

Ringo laughs, then pulls out the chair next to him. John can’t help but be glad he didn’t end up next to Paul. Paul, the Beatle he knows he’s wound up rooming with here at the hotel. Paul still won’t look at him and John thinks, he could put that off himself as well. 

“I’ll have them take our bags upstairs,” Brian offers, and he’s off with he and John’s luggage before John can say he could use the walk. He glances at Paul, finds that he’s caught him looking. It doesn’t feel as much a victory as he’d thought it might. 

John falls into something easy with George and Rings. He falls into an easy smile and ignores the dark cloud across the table. 

Brian sits next to Paul when he returns and John feels something twist in his gut. It’s the worst decision he could have made. And Paul makes that abundantly clear. He stands curtly. Brian looks up at him, shocked by just how impolite a gesture it is coming from someone he can always count on to be kind. 

“I’m tired,” he announces. 

“Okay, Paul,” George mutters. 

“We’ve only just arrived,” Brian says, glancing at John across the table. 

Paul follows his eye and keeps his dark eyes glued to John, even though he says: “I’m sorry, Brian.”

“Well,” Brian huffs. “If you’re unwell. If there’s anything I can have them send up for you--”

Paul tucks his chair back under the table. “No,” he says sharply. “That’ll be fine, Bri.”

“Right,” Brian says, maintaining composure in a way John knows he wouldn’t be able to. “Well, we have our conference tomorrow, so if you could be back down here at half-eight.”

Paul nods, professionalism as much an instinct as breathing. “Good night,” he says, and he’s gone, just as quickly as John and Brian had blown in.

“He’s been like that all day,” Ringo offers to the table. 

“He’s in one of his sulking moods,” George adds, glancing knowingly at John. 

“Maybe you ought to go talk to him --”

“No,” John says, before Brian can even finish his thought. 

John thinks of Paul, alone in their hotel room, while he drinks his first and second gin and tonic. He thinks of Paul pacing a hole through the cheap hotel carpet as he drinks his third. By his fourth, John knows it’s time to face the music. He excuses himself upstairs knowing George and Ringo won’t be far behind. 

The elevator climbs up to the eighth floor and John thinks that this must be what dying feels like. This slow, dreadful thing, that opens up to an unfeeling hallway that’s identical to all the hallways above and beneath it. 

He glances down at his key for the room number, each door counting down the moments he has left to live. John stops in front of his door and he’s just drunk enough that the hallway’s kitschy carpet doesn’t stop with him. He steadies himself on the door jamb for a moment. He knows Paul’s awake. He doesn’t know how, but he’s as sure of it as if he’d heard Paul’s voice in his head, daring him to come inside. 

There's a weak light still on. Probably a bedside lamp. And sure enough, as the small entranceway opens up into the larger room, John sees that Paul’s still up, sitting on his bed, still dressed, down to his shoes. He’s back against the headboard, his nose in a book, pointedly looking at the words in front of him and  _ not at John _ . 

So John looks pointedly elsewhere as well. He slips out of his jacket, draping it on the back of a chair.

Keeping his back to Paul, he begins to unbutton his dress shirt. He feels tense, the skin on the back of his neck tingles. Mimi had always told him that she had eyes on the back of her head and he very suddenly knows exactly what that must have felt like. Down to his undershirt, John thinks:  _ he wouldn’t dare be looking, would he _ ?

“I’ve never seen you with a tan,” Paul says quietly, answering John’s question for him.

Despite himself, John laughs derisively. “I don’t think I’ve ever had one,” he admits. 

He turns and he meets Paul’s eyes for a moment, so quick that John could have blinked and missed it. Paul’s nose is back in his book. 

_ Why would he have stayed awake _ ? John thinks. Why wouldn’t he have at least pretended to be asleep if he didn’t want to see John -- didn’t want to  _ talk to _ John? He hitches his hands on his hips and hears himself huff impatiently. He sounds just as fervent as he feels; both facts that John hates more than just about anything. Paul glances up at him, but he doesn’t open that mouth of his. Not for the first time, John wonders why it always has to be him that opens up this door.

But he asks anyway: “You weren’t tired then?”

John sees the muscles in Paul’s jaw clench and he thinks  _ that’s _ his Paul. His nervous, caustic, delicate Paul. But then he shrugs, his eyes a hundred miles away, as though he’s speaking to a camera and not his best mate. “I wasn’t in the mood,” he says, ever the diplomat. 

“That’s it?” John says.

Paul shrugs again and John feels something crack somewhere in his middle. That same something rises, through his lungs and up his throat, dying to find it’s way out through his teeth. They’d spoken to one another, once upon a time. Really  _ spoken _ . Now, they communicated through the silences between their words, and John can’t help but think he broke something that night in Paris. That night in Paris that had once been supposed to be that night in Spain. That bloody night in Paris where John opened his mouth and put a word to this thing between them.

Swallowing down all this vitriol, John sits down on his bed, his back to Paul; the space between them feeling far more intraversible than the few feet it actually is. 

He moves to unbuckle his belt, but behind him, he hears the springs groan under Paul’s weight as he shifts closer and John feels his blood run cold. He freezes, holds still, holds his breath, and makes Paul come to him. The room hangs, low and heavy, blanketing over them both until they’re all that’s left in the world. 

“Go on, then. How was it?” Paul asks, and it isn’t enough. John’s shoulders drop under the weight of the questions not asked. 

“How was what?” John answers, and it’s a challenge more than anything. 

Paul knows it too, because John can hear the courage in his voice when he says: “Your trip, John.” John looks over his shoulder at Paul, wanting more. And Paul, ever-observant Paul, gives him just that. “With  _ Brian _ ,” he adds. 

“Wouldn’t you like to know?” John says, laying claim to his victory when he finally gets it. 

“What?” Paul starts, voice all venom in a way John’s never heard it. “Now you don’t kiss and tell?”

John bristles. Studies Paul and decides that a fight is exactly what he needs right now. Something electric and grating to scrub him clean. “Don’t look so jealous, Paulie,” he starts. He turns further on the bed, keeping his eyes square on Paul, watches him as he sits up a little straighter, angry and willing enough to meet John somewhere in the middle. “It screws with your face.”

“I’m not jealous,” Paul says, and John goes searching for the part of that that feels like a lie and comes up empty. “What do I have to be jealous for?” That should sound defensive, like a cagey admission of guilt, but it just sounds honest. 

“You know damn well what for,” John spits back, but it hasn’t got any life to it. 

Paul just shakes his head solemnly. He looks away from John and it’s so  _ pitying _ John feels like he could die. “Did you get what you went there for?” Paul asks. “The credit,” he clarifies when John doesn’t answer. “Lennon-McCartney.”

John thinks he could rattle him. Right then and there. What John would give to live in the world where this whole fraught thing was about something as simple as business.  _ Paul’s world _ . “Yes,” John says, suddenly going red and embarrassed about the two different conversations they’ve been having. 

Paul nods, one curt nod. Something shrouds over him for a moment: disappointment, sadness, John can’t pinpoint it before Paul just goes stoic. “What did you do for it, hey?”

John goes red. There’s never been anything sacred between them, why should that start now? But John feels somehow responsible for Brian’s dignity, though he isn’t quite sure this white hot shame has got anything to do with the older man. 

“Does it matter?”

“Yes,” Paul immediately answers back, sounding all the calm that John wishes he was. “I want to know who I’m sharing a room with.” He means  _ what _ , John knows it, Paul knows it, but John gobbles up the kindness of it. His eyes drop. He watches his own hands knead holes in the comforter and distantly thinks: had his hands always looked like this? “He just wanted to touch me,” he allows. His words are tinged by the sad, stark desire he knows Brian feels towards him. This horrible, unrequited  _ need _ to be close. “So I let him.”

“Hmm,” Paul buzzes. John looks up at him and Paul’s unafraid of the way their eyes meet. He holds there and John hears Paul’s voice in his head:  _ I remember Paris _ . “That sounds very kind.”

John remembers Paris too. He remembers Paul next to him in bed, stiff with nerves, but unwilling to show John that he wasn’t wanted. He remembers Paul smiling. Squeezing his hand over coffee the following morning and then never touching him again. 

Then, Paul -- _ this Paul _ \-- is standing, and grabbing his jacket from the end of his bed. 

He circles around John, heading towards the door. 

The question bubbles up inside of him before John has the chance to stop it: “Are you leaving?”

Paul pauses. It’s a loaded question, they both know it. He turns, looks at John, his eyes big and sympathetic. “I just need a drink,” he says, as though he still owes John an explanation. John nods, more grateful than embarrassed for the lifeline. “You should sleep,” he continues. “You’ve had a long day.”

The door clicks shut behind him. There’s a moment where Paul doesn’t move and John wonders if he might just turn back around. But then he hears Paul’s shoes pad down the long hallway until they disappear. 

John gets in the shower. Turns it up as hot as it will go and stands underneath it until the water starts to go cold. When he returns to the bedroom, the lights have been shut off. Paul’s in his own bed, his back to John, feigning sleep. 

**1964.**

It’s the way they’re blanketed in total darkness; the rain drumming hard against the windows around them that gives Paul the nerve. It’s the way they’d looked at one another in Paul’s old bedroom on Forthlin Road, it’s  _ Paris _ , it’s the day they told John that Stuart was dead. It’s that they’re in Jacksonville, Florida, with nothing to do but think about how the storm outside might tear them apart. It’s the lot of them --  _ it’s John _ \-- telling each other how much they love one another. 

“It’s different,” Paul says once they’ve gone to bed. 

Beside him, John shifts to look at him. Paul can’t make out his face, but there’s just enough light to see John’s eyes still gleaning. A hundred  _ I love yous _ fresh on his lips and ready still to offer more. One to George, one to Ringo, and one to  _ Paul _ . An ‘I love you’ with a different weight. “With me,” Paul clarifies. “It’s different with me.”

“Yes,” John answers, quiet and heavy, made that way by just how much he means it. 

Without looking, Paul reaches for John’s hand. It isn’t enough, but he runs his thumb up and down the back of John’s fingers. Those powerful hands that had the ability to create and unravel all at once. In the middle of a Jacksonville hurricane, they feel small and delicate. 

“Paul?” John says, and he sounds so vulnerable, but so sure, that Paul thinks, he can’t hear those words. He can’t hear what comes next. He thinks he’d probably drown under the weight of it. 

So, he says them first, says them quickly so each word doesn’t have the time to build up its own significance. “John, you know I love you, but…”  _ Jesus _ , but what? He blanches, so dramatically, that he wonders if John had seen it, even in the middle of the night. They both hold their breath. Paul thinks that John, self-loathing John, wants to make himself hear the words that come next. Wants to make himself crumble under the weight of another person loving and then leaving. Their breaths hold for a moment longer. Paul thinks that if he opens his mouth, he might be sick. 

“I know,” John finally says, and Paul wonders if he’d actually said anything out loud, or if John had simply looked at him and heard those words anyway. 

“You know?”

John moves closer, then seems to catch himself. He stops, keeps space between them, and Paul suddenly wants nothing more than to have them chest-to-chest, waiting for the moment that their hearts start to beat in time with one another. 

“Yeah,” John says. He shrugs, eyes shirking down to the pile of sheets between them. “You can’t help it, can you?”

It’s so defeatist; Paul wonders what the John Lennon that might have fought for himself looks like. He thinks of John the day after his mother was killed by that drunk cop. Hopelessly sad, but still duly motivated to wake up the next day, and the one after it, and the one after. He looks at this John, his John, and wonders where he’ll be in the morning. 

“I should,” Paul says. 

“It’s alright,” John pushes back, shaking his head. And Paul thinks  _ when _ ? When did this become alright?

“I’m sorry --”

“Don’t,” John interrupts harshly. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he says, his voice streaked with shame. “I don’t need it.”

“What then?” Paul asks, stricken with just how responsible he feels. There’s a piece of John Lennon, in his hands forever, soft and fragile in a way Paul doesn’t feel he can keep safe. “What do you need?”

John shakes his head, coming too close to asking for love. He sits up, turns his back on Paul. Paul sits up too, fights the urge to reach out and rub small circles between John’s shoulder blades. “Just this,” John says to the opposite wall. “Whatever this is between us, just keep it.”

It’s a simple, sad thing. A crumb that will have to last a lifetime. 

Paul finally sees that he’s trembling. He stands suddenly, misses the way that John watches him, horrified that maybe this has become too much and Paul’s finally given in to the desire to just get the fuck out. 

“Are you leaving?” John asks incredulously. 

Paul stops, holds his hands out. He deliberately goes to the mini-fridge, pulls out two bottles of water. 

John isn’t looking at him anymore. His eyes are low and distant, embarrassed by his own fear of being left alone in a dark room. 

Paul crouches down between John’s knees. Looks up at John until John gazes back. He gently pushes the bottle of water into John’s hands and squeezes his knee for good measure. 

“Thank you,” John mutters and it feels significant, so Paul thinks that it must be. 

\--

“I don’t need anything from you, Paul,” John says to him over coffee the next morning. Where he’d once looked so gracious and open, now he just looks cool and calculated. His eyes don’t even come up from the mug two inches in front of his nose. “It is what it is.”

“Okay,” Paul says dumbly, because he doesn’t know what else to say, and ignores the way that the collar of his shirt suddenly feels too tight, and the way that the coffee in his belly suddenly feels too warm. 

**1967.**

Paul hadn’t thought it was possible, but they go deeper when they drop acid together. 

They sit cross-legged in front of one another in Paul’s living room. John isn’t wearing his glasses, but Paul thinks he must have never looked clearer. 

John reaches out between them, his palm flat down on the carpet. Paul does the same, touching his fingertips to the back of John’s hand and the world around him fuzzes to nothing. He looks into John, so long and hard that he forgets he isn’t looking into a mirror. 

“John?” John says. And Paul realizes that John must be seeing the same thing.

“Paul?” Paul parrots back to his own reflection. 

They ride out the high, living amongst one another’s bones. And Paul  _ knows _ what home feels like. He knows what Forthlin Road feels like. And Cavendish after it. He knows the embrace of his mother. He knows the feeling of a warm cup of tea. And he thinks, this is home too. With John --  _ in John _ . In its own way, this is home too. 

The next time they’re in the studio, Paul thinks he’s looking down at himself from the control booth with George Martin. He sees himself at the piano.

“Alright, John,” George Martin says into a speaker. 

“Yes?” Paul says, ignoring the way George regards him closely. If that’s Paul, down there at the piano, he must be John. 

“I was cuing John,” George says slowly. 

He looks back down at the recording room and George is right. It is John down there at the piano. His hair is shorter than the last time Paul saw him. And he’s wearing his glasses and that new moustache. They’ve never looked so different. 

“I don’t really know what it is yet,” John says self-dismissively. “It just sort of --” Then, he lets the piano speak for him as he tinkers a few chords. “I don’t know,” he continues over the music. 

“It’s good, John,” George urges over the mic. 

“I haven’t got the words,” he continues, and he sounds so close that Paul thinks he could reach out and touch him. “But it’s something like…  _ I am he… as you are he… as you are me…”  _ He fills the blank spaces with humming, but Paul doesn’t hear him anyway. He thinks, of course --  _ of course _ \-- John had felt close enough to touch. Paul absently touches his own throat. Words he’s never heard come to him in a way they never have before. And Paul thinks: is this how John feels when he writes a song? This free, this afraid, this vulnerable?

\--

They wake up in Wales and Brian is dead. 

Paul doesn’t see John until they’re both back in London. He can’t bear to look at him. 

John goes to Cavendish. Before he goes home, John goes to Cavendish. He knocks and waits for Paul to answer. He doesn’t know why. That isn’t what they do. But that’s what you’re supposed to do, isn’t it? When you’re showing up unannounced, you knock and you wait. That’s the normal way, and right now, John’s craving normalcy down to his bones. And not his normal, because frankly, this -- Brian being gone -- this is his normal. He’s pulled taut, shaking at the effort of keeping upright. 

Then, Paul answers and he feels like he could die. 

“It happened again,” he says, and he spends a moment wondering if Paul will know what he means, before he remembers that Paul exists somewhere between his eyes. And that John’s loss is Paul’s loss, over and over, again and again. And then Paul’s nodding and grabbing for John’s collar, pulling him inside. And John remembers that he exists somewhere inside of Paul too. There’s a piece of him left, somewhere outside of his body. Kept safe all these years by someone who loves him. 

Paul sits him down on the great green velvet chair that’s always swallowed John whole. 

There’s a quick mention of tea and then  _ nothing _ . Just John and an empty room. 

John closes his eyes, scans from the top of his head, down to his toes, looking for something --  _ anything _ \-- a sign of life. But it’s still just John in an empty fucking room. He hears the porcelain of two mugs clink together in the next room. He sees Paul in his head. Gathering milk and sugar, putting a kettle on, and something blooms in his chest and comes alive. It’s a gift, John realizes. Paul’s given him a gift. 

“John?” Paul says strangely from the kitchen. He’s felt something pass between them too. Except where John feels full, he realizes that Paul must feel empty. He thinks that, maybe, it wasn’t that Paul had held onto a part of him for all these years, it was that they both were holding onto something borne of both of them. Something they could pass back-and-forth whenever things felt too heavy. 

Then there’s a hot cup of tea in his hand, and he realizes that Paul is crouching down in front of him. He feels Paul’s hand at the back of his knee. 

“We’ll be okay,” Paul tells him. 

And John actually believes him. If they can keep this precious thing between them safe, they’ll be okay. 

Paul presses his lips to John’s. John watches Paul close his eyes. Watches as Paul’s hand comes up to touch his cheek. It's so intensely devoted that John closes his eyes, offers Paul that privacy and just allows himself to be kissed. 

It’s so peaceful that John even forgets that he hadn’t even had to ask for it. 

\--

John lets Paul have him in India. 

Lets Paul touch every part of him because it’s always been Paul, anyway. 

John cries in India because he’s twenty-seven years old and he thinks he’s never been this whole before, and won’t ever be again. 

“All these years, Paul,” John tells him miserably. “All these years, you were right there.” 

_ There _ , Paul thinks. He misses John, in this moment. He looks down at him, knows they’re only inches apart, but he misses him. They’re together, but they’re on different planes. Paul is here, but John is there, and John is here, but Paul is there. So Paul lays his hand to John’s heart, feels the pulse and tells him: “I’m right here.” 

John looks up at him, through the dark and without his glasses, and something passes between them, like it always does. Something real and electric that makes Paul shudder. He sets his forehead against John’s and says again: “I’m right here. Right now. Can’t you feel me?” 

John clutches his hand between their bodies and nods. “Yes,” he says, like he can’t believe it. 

Paul feels like he’s brimming. Whatever hole had been inside him is over-filled.  _ John _ overflows him and sloshes somewhere behind his rib cage.  _ It’s too much _ , Paul thinks.  _ It’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much _ . Paul falls into that rhythm. John is blown out and blissfully unaware beneath him. 

Paul feels like he’s on drugs, or at least something harder than weed. He looks down at John and loses where he stops and John begins. They’re together now, something closer than  _ locked _ , something transcendental and Paul blearily wonders if this is the spiritual experience they’ve all been waiting for. But Paul doesn’t feel accomplished, he feels afraid. He’s spilling out, giving John parts of himself that he never planned to lose. But he can’t control it. He recklessly gives it all to John simply because John’s asked him to. 

_ You’re his now _ , Paul thinks bitterly. And he knows it isn’t fair because all John did was ask. Paul thinks of Julia and Stuart and  _ Brian _ and for a God-awful moment, he wants John to give it all back. Give him back every piece of Paul he’s taken before there’ll be nothing left. 

“What’s wrong?” John suddenly asks. 

Paul can finally hear his own breaths, catching in his throat. His own blood drumming in his ears. He tries to gulp down some oxygen, but all he tastes is John. “I can’t breathe,” he manages. 

John shifts beneath him, props himself up on his elbows and distantly, Paul knows this is over. 

He feels John’s hands on his face, in his hair. He connects to it, just like the Maharishi taught him to. He connects to John’s hands because that’s just it, isn’t it? They’re John’s hands touching Paul’s body. They aren’t another part of him. 

“It’s alright,” he hears John say, not for the first time. “It’s alright.” Then he nods and looks solemn. “It’s too much,” he says, and for a sick moment, Paul wonders if he’d said his mantra out loud. 

“I’m sorry,” he says lamely. 

“It’s alright,” John says again, swinging his feet over the edge of the bed, reaching for a cigarette. Paul knows it isn’t. Something’s broken between them. Paul watches John’s hands as he lights a match. And he wonders, will those hands ever feel like his own again? John turns to look at him, offers him a cigarette of his own. Paul looks him in the eye and nothing passes between them. He misses John in this moment. John is here, but Paul is there.

Three days later, John walks in on Paul packing up his things in his ashram. 

He pauses in the doorway, takes in the emptying room and curses his own dramatics when he thinks he probably knows exactly what this space must feel like. 

“Are you leaving, Paulie?” It’s a tired accusation. Paul can’t remember the last time that they fought. With anyone else, that might feel like a good thing. 

Paul swallows hard and nods. “Yeah,” he says, voice wavering. “I got what I came for, didn’t I?”

Paul is sick in the airplane toilet when he realizes that John might think he’d used him. That he’d come for John --  _ to have John  _ \-- and had gone, just like the rest of them. 

He stares at his own reflection in the mirror long enough that his face becomes John’s, and he thinks:  _ transcendence, transcendence, transcendence _ . Wills it as an idea into John’s head. That’s what he’d come for. And that’s what he’d gotten with John laying beneath him. 

**1969.**

“Did you dream of me last night?” John asks, and Paul suddenly realizes that they’re alone. Somehow, in Studio 2, they’re alone. No other Beatles, no Yoko. Paul even steals a glance up at the empty recording booth: no George and no Geoff either. Alone, together, in the nighttime. 

Paul swallows hard; steadies himself for whatever might come next. “What?”

“I dreamt of you,” John explains, lighting himself a cigarette. “You were so real, so there, I thought you must have been dreaming about me too.”

“Oh,” Paul says, sifting through any memories of last night and comes up empty. “I don’t think so.”

John looks visibly disappointed. He returns his eyes down to his own guitar as he sets it back in its case. 

“I might have,” Paul offers feebly. 

John just shrugs. “You remember when we were kids and we had that same dream?” He sounds so cavalier that Paul wants to shake him. He sounds so casual, not understanding the intimacy and strangeness that their connection once held. 

Paul remembers. “Yes,” he says, but his voice catches in his throat. 

“I guess that’s just another part of it that we’ve lost,” John explains. 

“Part of what?” Paul asks, feeling the blood run cold in his hands. 

John looks up at him, gestures vaguely between the two of them. “This,” he says, and that sounds so insincere that Paul thinks bitterly, they put a name to this thing between them once. Once, they spoke about it. Once, they held it dear. Now it shifted and cracked between them, needling them at all the wrong times. 

“Oh,” Paul manages. 

“I used to think you lived up here,” John chides himself, ruffling a hand through his own hair. And Paul thinks he had. He had lived there. All those years ago, hadn’t he thought that existing somewhere inside of John had felt like home? “But you didn’t,” John continues. He locks his eyes into Paul’s and shrugs sadly. “You were just Paul.”

Distantly, Paul thinks, did they always speak to one another like this? This cryptically? This meaningfully? Why? When John was just a boy in Blackpool that needed to be told somebody loved him. Why hadn’t they just said that instead?

“I thought it felt like I was more,” Paul says, feeling like the last line of defense for this small precious thing still lighting up the space between them. 

“Maybe,” John allows. He clasps his guitar case closed. “But it was  _ too much _ to ever do anything about.”

The studio around them fades to Rishikesh, India. Paul watches as John traces along the gold thread in his guitar case. He reaches out and touches his fingertips to the back of John’s hand. Just as quickly as he had in India, Paul loses where he stops and John begins. He feels afraid all over again.  _ It’s too much, it’s too much, it’s too much _ . He knows it’s love between them, can feel John turn to sand beneath him. It spills out everywhere and Paul wants to hold it all close to his chest, keep it all together and warm and safe, but still more spills out between his fingers. Where is he meant to put the love that he can’t hold onto? 

“I never said that,” Paul says, because he  _ didn’t _ . He  _ couldn’t have _ . 

“You thought it,” John answers with a wry shrug. “That was enough those days.”

Paul feels something crack in his chest. He tiredly tells himself,  _ you don’t have to be right about this _ . He doesn’t. Somewhere, his mother tells him to apologize, but he’d always learned more from John, whose voice is always louder and he’s telling him:  _ make yourself known _ . 

“It was never supposed to become what it was, I --”

“You were  _ afraid _ .”

“You  _ told me _ , John,” Paul says through gritted teeth. “You  _ said _ . You didn’t need anything from me, but then all you did was ask!”

John looks as though he’s just had the wind knocked out him. He recovers quickly and Paul knows he’s had enough practice. “Well,” he says. “I just thought you might think I didn’t deserve to live that way.”

Paul swallows hard. He thinks of John, all his life, searching for all the scraps of love he can find. He thinks of John, eye-to-eye with Paul in Paul’s living room, pupils blown black with LSD. He thinks of John overturning every rock inside of Paul, asking:  _ where is it? Where is the love _ ? And Paul, not opening his mouth but saying anyway:  _ it’s all love _ . 

“John…”

“It doesn’t matter,” John says, waving his hand dismissively. “Because that’s why it works with Yoko. She loves me and isn’t afraid to do it.”

“Maybe she ought to be,” Paul says. He only has a moment to wish that had sounded more searing, before words continue to come from his mouth: “Being in love with you has been the most frightening thing in my life.”

“You what?” John says, his voice not much louder than a whisper. He’d caught his words as starkly as Paul had. Paul feels himself start to shake. John leans towards him, Paul finds himself leaning backward. John studies him, sifting through each card.  _ He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me… _ Sees the fear and regret in Paul’s eyes and decides on:  _ he loves me not _ . “You’re a bastard,” is all he says. 

“It can’t mean anything,” Paul says, hating the way panic sounds on his tongue. “We have Yoko and Linda now.”

“It would mean something if it were true,” John says. He grabs his guitar and turns his back on Paul. 

Whatever this had supposed to be: an olive branch, a confession, an absolution. It’s over, and it’s fallen flat. Paul feels sick with the urge to fill it all up with something. If this is going to be an ending, it should be soft and loving. It’s what they both deserve. It has to be what they deserve, after all these barren years of being alone together on a plane away from everyone else, but somehow still missing one another. 

“John…”

“Are you leaving, Paul?” John says, his back still turned. 

“John --”

“Paul,” John says smartly. “Please leave.”

Paul second-guesses a moment. He chews a hole through his bottom lip. Then, he gathers his guitar and gives John what he wants, because after all, isn’t that what this is all about?

Paul touches his hand to John’s as he passes him, but John doesn’t let him inside. 

\--

John calls a meeting and Paul knows exactly what he’s walking into.

So he’s late. 

As he takes the skinny hallway down towards the Apple conference room, John steps out from the toilets. They’re practically chest-to-chest, and Paul thinks that the universe must still have a real knack for timing. 

“Oh,” Paul says clumsily, before he notices the way that John’s eyes won’t rise up to meet his. “John? You alright?”

He barely gets the last word out before John says: “I’m sorry,” his eyes still down on the floor. 

“It’s alright,” Paul says through a weak laugh. “You can’t see through walls, can you?” John looks up at him and there’s more. Of course there’s more. Of course, Paul had known there was more. His smile falters, crumbling under the weight of the multitude of conversations they’re having without opening their mouths. 

“You’re leaving,” Paul finally says, as though it’s a question, but they both know it isn’t. 

John looks up at him and something passes between them. Paul feels immediately full, so full that he can’t help the small gasp of air that passes through his lips. 

John sets his hand on Paul’s bicep. It reminds Paul of his father after losing his mother.  _ Buck up _ , John’s telling him.  _ We’ll be alright _ . “Yes,” John says, as though that’s enough, but still, it’s all he offers. 

Paul watches John head down the small hallway and disappear into another room. 

Paul had loved Jane Asher. He’d been devastated when they’d ended things. He realizes he doesn’t have a word for the way he feels now. All he knows is that John had made him feel full, and then empty. Paul glances down the vacant hallway. Whatever John had given him, he’d taken it back. 


End file.
